Baikonur Rollout [3]

So there already was a locomotive, a flat car and a tiny eight-wheel driven all-terrain truck. I started working on the diorama base a week ago and it had dried. Wasn't what I expected; it shrunk more than I anticipated at first hand. But no worries, I wanted it to give it another finish anyway. So yesterday I mixed up some plaster made from gypsum and started moulding the landscape. It came out very smooth indeed.
Now then, while that was curing, the transporter needed to be made.

The base plate with gypsum layer added. Nice and smooth railroad dyke, nice and rugged landscape.

More after the jump.

The building of the transporter itself went much easier than I thought it would be. The original model made by Lars Folmann is orange, I wanted the transporter to be plain grey. I first tried to just recolour the original model but it was too pixelated for a clean colour removal. So I kind of redrew the whole kit in Photoshop to get clean lines. this outline model was then printed on 200 grams grey paper. Here and there I doubled the thickness, for example with the chassis of the car, which consists of big solid metal I-beams.

The cantilever arm structure was a bit delicate but it came together amazingly easy in this scale. All parts were edge glued, so no glue tabs were left on.

The 1/400 version next to its orange original sized (1/100) version I made a couple of years ago.

Because this will be a still diorama, I glued the cantilever arm in its resting position, the rocket is yet to come.

Then I worked my way through getting the display base a bit more colourful. A layer of paint, another layer and some more, glue and diorama grass fibres were added. I just did this on the fly, there was nothing actually planned on forehand. I wanted to recreate an early morning, frosty, early spring situation. I'm not done yet, there is still a lot more detailing to do.

...but it is not bad for just a day's work. (-;

I am a bit colourblind. So messing around with reds, greens and their tertiary derivatives is kind of hard for me. Besides, it was all getting too greeny and browny and it also had too much of a mid-day feel to it after the first layer. So I kept on adding dabs of paint, with an almost dry brush.

Now this is more like it. Frosty bits, greyish bits that seem to be hard frozen but not snowy and of course the addition of some grass. It's a steppe, after all. The grass was added by using glue I applied with my finger and then taking a good tweezerfull of grass fibres and then just repeatedly pushing the tweezers and grass into the glue. This way it all became a little roughened up and more natural in my opinion. There's still more to come.

To get a sense of scale and feel of the landscape, here's the Tatra on the steppe.